111 courses with the subject ENG, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ENG 109Contemporary American Cinema
Instructor Parker This course in 21st century American cinema will concentrate on feature films, documentaries, television, and animation–all from the last ten years. The study of film includes well-established terms describing elements of principal photography, production, and post-production; as a result, the work in “Contemporary American Cinema” will include formal analysis using film studies terminology. But the terminology will also be applied, as we will read film methodically and analytically. Two essays, one small group project, and some shorter writing exercises will be required; a midterm and final can be expected. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Digital and Screen Media major requirement. Satisfies Film and Media Studies minor requirement.
English 110 satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Check schedule to determine which course is being offered. Repeatable for credit if the topic is different. FALL 2026 ENG 110-A: History of Nature Writing Norris Course Description: In this course, we will study the history of nature writing in America, examining how writers have crafted meaningful environmental narratives across time. We’ll consider the way narrative strategies have evolved and how each text shapes readers’ understanding of themselves and the world around them. We’ll read a variety of writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We’ll consider how the texts reflect and shape the landscapes around them, taking into account historical context, scientific discoveries, and racial and gender bias. Satisfies Environmental Studies major and minor requirement. ENG 110-B: Caribbean Lit Flanagan Caribbean literature explores, in English, some of the major themes, motifs, tropes, etc., in some of the fiction, poetry, films, and music produced by writers born in the Caribbean. Out of these “small” spaces have come three Nobel Prize winners, music that is venerated across the globe, and literature that provokes, delights, and sustains. So vast is the area and plentiful the literary output, however, that this course can be only an introduction. We will, though, respond to some major questions, based upon the belief that the Caribbean is critical to any fundamental understanding of the New World experience. What, for example, are the consequences for Caribbean literature of European and British incursions into the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia? What contributes to the paradox of image and self-perception, resistance and revolution in the literature? Given the mélange that is the Caribbean, is there a Caribbean literary aesthetic? Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Diversity requirement in English major. ENG 110-C: Lyric: Sappho to Taylor Swift Vincent Grounded in contemporary music, this course explores the history of lyric from Sappho to Taylor Swift. Other key authors include Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Tracy K. Smith, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, and Petrarch. Each week, we will examine the relevance of lyric poetry to modern music and discover how literary forms have persisted over the centuries. Students will be encouraged to study and share their own favorite songs throughout the semester, and we will receive visits from touring musicians. Spring 2027 ENG 110-A: Television Fackler ENG 110-B: Children’s Literature, Kids Reading Campbell Children’s literature, meaning written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people, includes works ranging from classics of world literature , picture books and easy-to-read stories written for children to fairy tales , fables , primers, and contemporary books. In 2024, reports bemoan reading losses and struggles among children, while elementary school libraries in some states have had to purge many holdings in responsive to legislation intended to protect children and ensure parental control over content children consume. In this course, we will Review a brief history of the evolution of children’s literary genres, Examine a range of contemporary children’s literature, Discuss the purposes of and controversies about such works in elementary school libraries and classrooms, Explore case studies of texts impacted by state legislative decisions. By semester’s end, students will know much about how children’s literature works-and is presumed to work-in and on contemporary American society. ENG 110-C: Video Game Talk Jung In this course, we will delve into the world of audio-visual-interactive media, commonly known as video games, treating them as primary sources to explore the realms of storytelling, poetry, and essay writing. Students will embark on an analytical journey, dissecting the themes, motifs, and the intricate interplay between gameplay mechanics and narrative content within this relatively young yet profoundly influential medium. Our exploration will encompass a selection of video games, including titles such as Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium, Dark Souls, Undertale, among others, though this list is not exhaustive. Additionally, we will examine the connections between these games and older literary forms, seeking to uncover the thematic bridges between, for instance, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s fragmented storytelling in Dark Souls and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented poetry in The Waste Land. Throughout the duration of the course, students will have the opportunity to critically and creatively express their experiences with video games, fostering a deeper understanding of the medium’s artistic and narrative potential. Furthermore, our class will engage in discussions surrounding the broader cultural context of video games by exploring video game journalism and criticism through reading and viewing relevant materials. ENG 110-D: Literature & Medicine Vaz Science and medicine have indelibly influenced how we understand and respond to the physical and mental state of being human. We will consider how an appreciation of literary texts and the questions they broach give us a different insight into the human condition and affect our awareness of health, addiction, illness, disease, suffering, recovery, and death. In doing so, we will also pay close attention to how gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or other cultural biases color our perceptions of physical and mental health. Satisfies the Public Health Interdisciplinary Minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. OTHER TOPICS ( not offered in current academic year
ENG 111African American Literature and Film: The Politics of Watching
Instructor Gill-Sadler For many contemporary readers and movie watchers, reading and watching African American literature and film, respectively, represent their desire to support and be in solidarity with African American political struggles. However, African American writers and filmmakers have historically complicated assumptions that consuming African American literature and film is the equivalent of supporting African Americans or African American liberation struggles. This course will explore the politics of making, consuming, and critiquing African American literature and film while expanding what we define as political, who is considered a political actor, and the relationship between politics and art broadly. Writers and films included in this course include Toni Morrison, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Black Panther , Sorry to Bother You , and short film from the L.A. Film Rebellion. Satisfies an Africana Studies major requirement.
Instructor Norris This class, to borrow a phrase from Ross Gay, is “a laboratory of wonder and care.” The course is designed to help us investigate our truths and find the best way to represent this grappling in prose. Along the way, we’ll consider how the world reflects the self and how the self reflects the world. In order to fit together the eye and the I , we will read and write in several subgenres of creative nonfiction, including memoir, travel, immersion, and personal essays. We will work through craft techniques and formal structures in order to examine the best ways of telling truthful stories. We will offer feedback to each other in a supportive environment, and we will write our own truths as best we can. Satifies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Instructor Staff English 202 introduces students to the art and craft of writing short fiction and poetry of all varieites including “slam”. Creativity is essential, as is dedication to writing, reading, and engaging in productive discussions of each other’s work.
Instructor Jung (Fall 2026), Rippeon (Spring 2027) Practice in the writing of poetry, with attention paid to various techniques, approaches (free verse and formal verse), and the reading of contemporary poets. The course is workshop-based: peer critiques constitute the basis for each class.
Instructor Flanagan The short story comes, like shoes, in numerous sizes and styles so we will study stories in various configurations by a variety of writers. During the first week of class, students are asked about their reading preferences and adjustments will be made to the syllabus to accommodate specific desires. After learning how to develop characters, write dialogue, create scenic settings and the other necessities in good fiction through examples provided in published stories, writers will be asked to demonstrate their creativity through the creation of Flash/Sudden fiction and longer stories. Creativity, a sense of humor, and the willingness to learn how to write compelling stories are required. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Jackson This course is a workshop largely based on the writing that you and others in your class accomplish. Our explorations in writing for the screen will include learning official screenplay formatting and studying how traditional story structures and notable screenplays work. The class will take you through an entire creative process, including a series of storytelling exercises, character dialogues, detailed treatments, and dramatic scenes that steadily build over the semester toward the completion and revision of a short screenplay.
Instructor Kokdil E Making films is more than just pointing your camera at a subject, recording an event or conveying interesting information. Your film will be a historical document and a work of art filtered through your worldview, experiences and personal vision. Directing your film means making difficult choices: from initial story concept to your first screening. Both documentaries and narrative fiction films are based on a series of tools and techniques. Employing these tools, Filmmaking will focus on students choosing how best to tell their story, design their production, develop their aesthetic and how to capture their story on film. Through the screening of selected film clips, reading, in-class pre-production, production and post-production instruction and weekly assignments, the class will provide an understanding of the art of filmmaking: from concept to screen. By the end of the class, each student will produce, film, edit and screen their own fiction- or non-fiction film. The goal of the class will be to develop the skills needed to enable the student to fulfill their vision via the art of cinema. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies and Digital Studies. Satisfies English major requirement. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Instructor Parker “Cartoons and Comics” is an introductory comics studies course focusing on the history of the art form in the United States since 1890 as well as current phenomena in the field. At the center of this study lies the concept of “double literacy,” that is, the combination of equally important vocabularies, visual and linguistic, that constitutes a cartoon or a comic. From a critical perspective as well as in a studio context, “Cartoons and Comics” will also offer two types of learning-studying and making-in its treatment of the material, culminating in a final project of the student’s choosing, either a scholarly or a creative endeavor, at the end of the term. “Comics and Cartoons” will begin with “The Yellow Kid” controversy in the 1890s, then examine the advent of the Funnies pages in newspapers, as well as trends in the field including the MCU, underground and indie comix, Manga, Mad and Raw magazines, digital DIY, and web comics. Moreover, the course will also consider the ways the artwork might be disseminated, with an eye on the differences in how print and digital media engage the reader and viewer. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Studio Art major and minor requirement. Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Instructor Churchill We live in an age of visual culture. To be literate, we need to read and interpret words and images, as well as the interactions between them. Word-Art examines texts that combine words and images, such as graphic novels, illuminated books, and graphic poetry. Read and analyze word-art, and then create your own. The course is a double hybrid: word/image texts and critical/creative writing-designed to stimulate your critical and creative faculties. Take a creative approach to critical writing and apply critical thinking to your creative expression. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Prerequisites & Notes No credit if you have taken ENG 390
Instructor Rippeon (Fall 2026) This course introduces students to the analysis of literature across a wide range of forms, including the poem, novel, play, and film. We will read some of the most famous works of literature from antiquity to the present, while engaging with them both critically and creatively. Along the way, students will develop foundational skills in literary criticism and become more perceptive and discerning readers. Instructor Vaz (Spring 2027) This course will introduce you to the critical study of literature and equip you with the tools and vocabulary you will need to become careful, critical, and creative readers. In addition to foregrounding the formal study of poetry, fiction, drama, and film, we will also focus on theoretical questions that should inform literary analysis, so that you can develop original and sophisticated interpretations of texts. Instructor Vincent (Spring 2027) This course introduces students to the analysis of literature across a wide range of forms, including the poem, novel, play, and film. We will read some of the most famous works of literature from antiquity to the present, while engaging with them both critically and creatively. Along the way, students will develop foundational skills in literary criticism and become more perceptive and discerning readers.
Instructor Campbell Ever wonder what would move people to forbid, burn, even stab books? Come explore this question in Young Adult Literature. In this course, we will consider YA fiction from both various critical perspectives and within various educational contexts. Over the semester, we will review a brief history of the genre; examine a range of contemporary young adult fiction; discuss the purposes of and controversies about teaching such works in middle and high school contexts; and do research on case studies in which specific texts have been contested. By semester’s end, students will know much about how literature works-and is presumed to work-in and on contemporary American society. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Educational Studies minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Instructor Churchill “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. …When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie This course features in-depth study of a complex text that provides multiple avenues for students to venture beyond the “single story,” direct their own learning and research, and explore new ideas, perspectives, and questions. Its first iteration will focus on Richard Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, ‘The Overstory’ (2018). Variously described as “an environmental epic,” “an expansive allegory,” and “a gigantic fable of genuine truths,” ‘The Overstory’ tells the story of the “forgotten kinship” between humans and trees, asking us to recognize trees as protagonists whose fates are entangled with our own. Each of the nine main characters has a connection to a particular tree, and in the course of the novel, their individual story lines grow together and cross fertilize, like tree roots. Combining botany, dendrology, mythology, history, technology, ethics, and environmental activism, ‘The Overstory’ provides rich terrain for students to explore topics of interest and connect issues raised in the novel to their own lives, while gaining deeper understanding of the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds. As they read the novel, students will keep a reading log, which will be syndicated to a centralized course website. They will use tags to locate common themes and issues, and reply to each other’s posts, thereby generating an organically expanding, interconnected, communal response to the novel. The reading logs will enable students to leaf out from the buds of new ideas, one of which they will choose to branch out and to pursue a topic or issue in greater depth through a research, experiential, or investigative project of their own design. Students will also adopt a tree and keep a handwritten journal, and compose a final reflection about their own overstory, in which they envision their ideal relationship to the nonhuman world and identify means and practices for achieving and sustaining it. Satisfies English major and minor requriement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Vincent This course examines the central roles of race and colonialism in the formation of English literary and national identity. We will survey the long history of racism and the colonial imagination in English literature, from the medieval legends of King Arthur to the eighteenth-century autobiography of the formerly enslaved abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. Over the course of the semester, we will read some of the most famous works of English poetry, prose, and performance. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satifies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
ENG 242Women’s Work: 21st Century Female Playwrights (=THE 242)
Instructor Staff This course provides a close look at work created for the stage by women since 2000. The analysis of plays written and produced in the 21st century will be set in the context of feminist and queer theory which has offered insights into the cultural function of “women’s work.” Satisfies a requirement in the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Theatre major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Vincent With the arrival of technologies like the telescope and microscope, early modern authors began to explore the newfound reality of an infinite universe. In this course, we will investigate how English baroque authors imagined the infinite and grappled with its implications for religion, politics, and society. Each week, we will approach literature as a tool for exploring the infinite and its related concepts, including chaos, excess, and the multiverse. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Rippeon This is a course surveying the history, practice, and potentials of “the book.” Readings and other materials will be historical, literary, and theoretical, and will consider the changing status of the book with a focus from the late 19th century to the present. Activities are both critical and creative, and will include several short writing assignments and hands-on student projects.
Instructor Vincent From King John (1899) and Hamlet (1900) to 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Gnomeo and Juliet (2011), the plays of William Shakespeare have appeared on the silver screen since the dawn of motion pictures. This course will focus on several of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, as we explore how directors and actors have reinterpreted his works cinematically. Along the way, we will learn about methods of film analysis, as well as theories of reception and adaption. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Staff English 260 will provide you with a solid historical introduction to the poetry and prose texts of a little more than two centuries of British literature, spanning Romanticism, the Victorian era, modernism, and post-1945 literature. We will focus on specific authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft. William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, and Eavan Boland in order to study how they exemplify or complicate our understanding of literary history. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Fox This course covers a period in time (roughly 1860-1960) that was critical to shaping Western drama as we know it. As we will see over the course of the semester, cultural conversations about race, gender, labor, justice, war, art, and society initiated by dramatists like Dion Boucicault, Henrik Ibsen, and Anton Chekhov were carried forward into the twentieth century by artists like Angelina Weld Grimké, Sophie Treadwell, and Tennessee Williams. We’ll start our survey reveling a bit in that great 19th century theatrical form, melodrama, as it was used to fight slavery in The Octoroon . We’ll then look at how different playwrights experimented with form and content (why was realism considered so dangerous? How did expressionism try to physically embody the tumult of emotions?) We’ll talk about the aesthetic and cultural contexts in which these plays emerged (and which plays caused riots!), and what they tell us about their societies, their audiences…and us. Our goal is to complicate our understanding of dramatic history by understanding how these plays were and are not only “great art,” but significant sites for challenge to conventional social and artistic norms that will ultimately feel more familiar to you than not. To that end, I will be putting some of the plays in conversation with their contemporary revisions or sequels. No prior experience reading drama is necessary, and I welcome students of all levels and from across the disciplines. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Theatre major and minor. Satifies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Fox In the first two decades of the 21st century, human existence has been made more precarious by racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia; war and conflict; global warming; health inequities; and widening social and economic disparities. Contemporary American playwrights have held up a powerful mirror to such inequities, and deployed the real bodies of actors to bring to light the stories of those whose very existence has been placed at risk. In so doing, they do not simply reify simplistic stories of either victimhood or inspirational overcoming. Rather, they assert these stories as a fundamental part of American identity, taking a more complex, nuanced look at what it means to navigate systemic inequity while asserting identity, integrity, and dignity. In this course, we will look at plays from the last three decades of American drama that take inequity and its aftereffects as their main concern. The plays we read take up issues including gender transition; the school-to-prison pipeline; bullying; the institutionalization of disabled people; the immigrant experience, especially that of women; the erasure of people of color; the effects of the loss of heavy industry in rural America; and the lack of universal health care. How does the stage invite us to debate the ethical questions at the heart of such inequities? How does drama not only invite our empathy, but spur us toward a deeper understanding of experiences different from our own that might result in meaningful systemic change? Previous experience reading drama is not required. Satisfies a English major and minor requirement. Satisfies a Theatre minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff This course considers the development of literary forms across the genres of the novel, drama, and poetry after Modernism and the end of the British empire. We will examine works from 1945 to the present, as writers tackle late twentieth- and early twentieth-century pressures such as globalization, terrorism, and genetic engineering. The post-War period of British drama is comparable in depth to the Renaissance. Meanwhile, it is a moment of intense self-reflection and reflexivity, as novelists take a distinctly metafictional turn. Authors under consideration include Larkin, Hill, Osborne, Pinter, Amis, Spark, Ishiguro, Winterson, Churchill, Orton, Barnes, Carter, Orwell, Dabydeen, Leonard, Harrison, McEwan, and Smith.
Instructor Fox In this course, we will explore disability as it is depicted in literary and cultural texts, from the canon to disability culture. These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil. Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death. We will reconsider disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and learn about the presence of disability culture. Rather than trying to catalog all the examples of disability in literature, this course seeks to use disability studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two. We will reconsider representations of disability in literature; examine how disability is a culturally constructed category like race, gender, class, and sexuality (and how it intersects with those); study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture; and consider how disability aesthetics and disability justice meaningfully shape the processes and products of artistic creation. This course presumes no prior coursework in English and welcomes those from across the disciplines interested in studying the social and cultural experience of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement Satisfies Public Health major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff What is Asian American literature, and how do we determine its geographical and cultural scope? What is the relationship between Asian American literary aesthetics and political concerns? This course introduces students to the diverse traditions and key debates in Asian American and transpacific writing, paying special attention to historical, social, and political contexts that shape our understanding of literature. Beginning with scholarship that characterize Asian American culture as inherently heterogeneous and capacious, we will explore the coalitional possibilities and incommensurabilities within and beyond Asian American narratives. We will examine key themes pertinent to Asian American literature such as immigration and exclusion, militarism and refugee displacement, colonization, gender, and sexuality. Key authors include: Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Thi Bui, Craig Santos Perez, and Annelise Chen. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Jensen American Literature: Mississippi author Eudora Welty said, “Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers…great talkers.” Indeed, the myriad regions, communities, and cultures across the South have produced rich literary legacies. How do writers conceive of, portray, and define the American South? What literary legacies and traditions has the South provided, and how do its geographies and cultures shape American literature? This class will explore how Southern writers craft-and contest-impressions of the South and Southern identity. We will consider how the literature of the South reckons with complex historical legacies, like those of enslavement and the Lost Cause, and we will investigate how Southern literature figures into larger national and global conversations around environment and climate change. In this class, we will read texts by authors like Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, Flannery O’Connor, Silas House, among others. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
ENG 282African American Literature: 1955 and Beyond (=AFR 282)
Instructor Flanagan This course introduces students to some of the literature African Americans produced during the crucial years of the modern civil rights movement. Works by Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Wanda Coleman, Malcolm X, and others will be studied alongside major connecting moments in the struggle for civil liberties, and for their introduction of new literary modes into the American canon. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Satisfies an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff Examines the history and development of the modern short story and its various subgenres through a close reading of texts from many authors and cultures. The course also gives some attention to writing for publication and allows the option of submitting creative work. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Vaz British imperialism permeated the British literary tradition much as it did the globe. Using the lens of postcolonial theory we will examine the fictions and critiques of empire constructed in and through selected texts from the eighteenth century through the present in an attempt to unravel the cultural function of these powerful fictions. Our investigations will be informed by contemporary public discourse about slavery, imperialism, and nationalism, so that we can better grasp the literary and socio-political context of British colonialism and its after-effects. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
ENG 285Politics & Performance: 20th Century Theatre (=THE 285)
Instructor Staff The course is a study of plays and theatrical theory from a range of geographic regions. The course explores ways practitioners experimented with form and content in articulating their reactions to the human condition of the 20th century. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
ENG 286African-American Literature: 19-20th Century- (=AFR 286)
Instructor Flanagan This course introduces students to examples of African American literature and literary criticism from the 20th to 21st centuries. Major authors from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and beyond will be considered alongside theoretical formulations from critics such as Barbara Christian, Michael Awkward, and Henry Louis Gates. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English Department major. Satisfies the Humanities elective in the Africana Studies major. Satisfies elective in the Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
ENG 287African American Literature and the Archive
Instructor Gill-Sadler This course explores how a variety of archives, from an authors’ personal papers to institutional special collections, both inform and are represented in African American literature. What new literary forms and histories might be discovered through archival research? How might African American literary texts model more equitable and justice-oriented approaches to archives and the practice of archiving? The course will consider these questions through close readings of texts by writers like Gloria Naylor, Erna Brodber, John Keene, and Roger Reeves and through visits to Davidson Special collections and bookstores for rare, Black books. Satisfies Africana Studies major and requirement. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. (Innovation) Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Fox What does it mean to use the stage to give voice to being part of a multicultural community? How does theater help fight stereotypes and oppression? In what ways do plays rewrite history and create pride? What does it mean to stage the multicultural experience in a globalized world? How does theater show us the intersections of different kinds of identity? This course will answer these questions and more through our study of twentieth- and twenty-first century drama from several rich traditions of multicultural playwriting in America from within the BIPOC, LGTBQ, and disabled communities. We will explore issues raised in their plays including identity, the American Dream, stereotypes, history, and hope. No prior experience reading drama is necessary. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Flanagan This iteration of World Literature will focus on literary texts from Nigeria, South Africa, Martinique, and the Czech Republic-in translation. The spread of English as a lingua franca around the world has affected the languages in which literary texts are written. Since independence from various British and European countries, former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean have, however, produced novels, plays, and poems that, while written in English, resonate with the artifacts of indigenous, and diasporic tenets, even as they interrogate the past. Thus, we have the creation of a different type of “World” literature. A similar phenomenon has occurred in former Soviet bloc countries, so that in the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan, for example, writers have asserted their rights to produce literary texts that are reflective of their pre-Soviet cultures and explore the ramifications of political restrictions. Facilitating course discussion is Dr. Brenda Flanagan, a US Cultural ambassador and Fulbright specialist in South Africa and Kazakhstan. She is a prize-winning novelist and playwright, whose most recent book examines writings by the “Mother” of Czech surrealism, Eva Svankmajerova. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies a major (diversity) and minor requirement in English. Prerequisites & Notes Designed for majors and non-majors
Instructor Flanagan Literary Mysteries is an exciting Innovation course that offers opportunities for students to explore the lovely literary language that writers such as P.D. James, Umberto Eco, Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell employ in novels such as An Unsuitable Job for a Woman , The Island of the Day Before , Missing Joseph , and Dark Corners , respectively. Forget the blood, gore, shoot-em-up of many ordinary crime stories. Literary Mysteries are intellectually and dramatically intriguing, layered, intricate, and deftly plotted. Students will build evidence boards in digital sites as they follow the clues embedded in these plots to try to solve the mysteries before the end of the text, and in doing so, they will enhance their deductive skills. Satisfies the Innovation course requirement in English. Satisfies a literature elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
ENG 292Documentary Film - History, Theory, and Production of Documentary
Instructor Staff The course will first examine the modes of the documentary genre, often described as expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive. For each mode we will read relevant history and theory, and watch representative documentaries. Students will then make a series of short documentaries as a means of understanding how these modes affect both the production and reception of a documentary. We also consider more specific sub-genres of documentary such as science/nature, politics/protest, biography, and mockumentary. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Course is repeatable for credit when students take different topics. Instructor Jung In this course, students will embark on a literary exploration, using the medium of creative writing as a means of self-expression within various traditions. We will closely examine poetry, fiction, and essays authored by individuals of East Asian descent, who are part of the ongoing East Asian diaspora. The literature emerging from the East Asian diaspora is a rich tapestry of narratives and voices, representing people from diverse origins who are in constant motion, diffusing, arriving, and reinventing themselves in the modern era. Their global journeys have turned East Asian diasporic literature into a site of profound transformation within the realm of English literature, driven by their creative expressions within the literary traditions they encounter. These writers and poets find themselves at the crossroads of cultural and historical influences, navigating between their origin languages and the languages in which they live, work, and write. They exist in the interstitial spaces, and the literature of the East Asian diaspora embodies the struggle of imaginative minds carving out distinctive spaces within the English and American literary traditions through their creativity. Our exploration of this facet of recent literary history will be centered on writers and poets who re-envision the folklore and mythologies of their source cultures, or those who reimagine tropes from speculative fiction and other genres by incorporating these elements into English literary forms. We will trace how this act of re-imagination creates new avenues for their creativity to infuse meaning into their identities as arrivals in a foreign literary landscape. Satisfies English Department major and minor requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Churchill Read major texts of the Harlem Renaissance and explore issues of race, gender, sexuality, migration, & diaspora that shaped this formative moment in twentieth century literature. We will read poetry, fiction, essays, and plays by W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and others, situating their work in the context of developments in modern art, music, sociology, psychology, and print culture. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Area: North America). Satisfies a requirement in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Fackler, Staff This course prowls the house of fiction’s dangerous and often forbidden spaces employing the visions and voices of transgressive agents, who go places they should not, wrestle monsters literal and figurative, and rescue bodies (of information and imagination) essential to us all. Readings: selected 19th, 20th, and 21st century fiction by women, from A Room of One’s Own , to In the Cut, to Swamplandia , and lots of great works in between. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Instructor Jung In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the captivating world of the cyberpunk genre, where futuristic dystopias, advanced technology, and societal upheaval collide. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of speculative fiction, offers a unique lens through which to explore themes of technology, surveillance, rebellion, and the human condition. Our primary texts will include iconic works such as William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” and others. While these narratives are set in fictional futures, they provide thought-provoking commentary on the consequences of technological advancement, surveillance states, and the blurred lines between humanity and artificial intelligence. Each text offers a distinctive perspective on the cyberpunk genre, offering rich material for analysis and discussion. The course is designed to deepen students’ understanding of cyberpunk literature and its capacity to critique and reflect upon contemporary technological and societal issues. Through an intensive study of each text, students will examine the genre’s portrayal of technology’s impact on individuals and society, as well as its exploration of themes such as identity, corporate power, and rebellion. By delving into the cyberpunk genre, students will not only gain a deeper appreciation for this unique form of speculative fiction but also develop a heightened awareness of the ways literature can reflect and shape our perceptions of the rapidly evolving technological landscape. Satisfies English major and minor requirement Satisfies Digital and Screen Media interdisciplinary mjaor requirement Satisfies Digital Studies interdisciplinary minor requirement Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement
Instructor Flanagan The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’ popular music, food, and landscapes-ah, those sandy beaches!-to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced three winners of Nobel prizes-two in Literature and one for Economics. In novels, poems and plays we’ll examine the ways in which this particular part of the “Empire” wrote back to Europe before creating its own distinctive body of literature. The course is open to all students, and knowledge of literary theory is not a prerequisite. The most relevant theories will be taught to the class. Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean). Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Campbell Within the broad world of contemporary fiction, young adult fiction is a specialized publisher category, one determined by the presumed age of the reader and characterized by protagonists who are also coming of age. Wide-ranging across subgenres (realism, fantasy, horror, realism, romance, science fiction), young adult fiction is a desirable commodity offered by all major trade publishers and tops best-seller AND banned books lists. While the phrase young adult may imply “juvenile” or “simple,” award-winning young adult novels are complex, varied, and culturally significant. As do the other 300 level forms courses in ENG, this hybrid writing course adopts a collaborative laboratory approach to its specialized literary genre via theory and practice, emphasizing both study of and making of the object (young adult fiction). Together we will read literary criticism, discuss educational scholarship on the impacts of literacy, consider publishing trends, analyze contemporary narratives, and meet people publishing in field and read their work. Neither a workshop nor a lecture course, “Forms of Young Adult Fiction” will promote writing and reading as acts of play. The course will require three different types of writing while assuming no significant expertise in any one area. Each student will produce literary scholarship, market analysis, and fiction and elect to pursue either a critical or a creative final project. We will discuss creative work in progress through adopting practices common to television, specifically, the developmental method offered by the “Writers’ Room.” Students will bring assignments to the Writers’ Room and work with peers generatively, through brainstorming that focuses upon development, revision, and advancement rather than critique. Ultimately, the course aims to investigate young adult fiction; what makes it work? What are its key components? What moves are possible in this genre? What moves are controversial, but important, in this genre? What are stories yet to be told and can I do the telling? We will innovate and play together. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Global Literary Theory major requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Instructor Norris This class will focus on generating new creative nonfiction and considering the craft decisions that build it. We’ll read published work that helps us hone our skills, and you’ll be expected to present on contemporary writing, but the bulk of this course will be spent giving and receiving feedback on our own work. Formal range is encouraged: personal essay, memoir, reportage, profile, travel, hybrid, graphic, collage, braid, lyric, etc. are welcome. No matter the form your pieces take, they will be received in a supportive environment that views writing as a process and feedback as a way to help move your work closer to its truest self. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor. Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.
Subject
ENG
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.
Instructor Parker “Forms of Poetry” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. “Forms of Poetry” explores three different types of writing (literary criticism, critical theory, and poetry) while assuming no significant expertise in any one area. Satisfies English major requirement. Satisfies English minor requirement. Satisfies Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary minor requirememnt. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric Prerequisites & Notes No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.
Instructor Parker A “laboratory” course focusing upon advanced work in writing poetry, with various experimental techniques explored, to consider what a poem is and/or does. The course is workshop-based: peer critiques constitute the basis for each class. A collection of poems is required as a final project. Prerequisites & Notes Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.
Subject
ENG
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.
Instructor Flanagan, Parker Advanced work in writing fiction. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors. Students must complete ENG 204.
Subject
ENG
Type
course
Repeatable
may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.
Instructor Jackson This workshop class offers a deeper exploration of the possibilities of screenwriting and cinematic storytelling. We will explore a wide variety of creative techniques, narrative devices, and dramatic structures in different genres. Most of the work will be based on the writing that you and others in your class accomplish, including a short screenplay for students from the Advanced Filmmaking class to shoot over the course of the semester. We will also adapt a short story into cinematic form and work collaboratively in small cohorts. Acclaimed screenwriters and filmmakers will visit the classroom to share their insights and experiences.fferent techniques, narrative devices, and story structures. Students will adapt a short story into cinematic form, work collaboratively in small cohorts, and complete a successful longer screenplay. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Film, Media and Digidal Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rethoric Requirement. Prerequisites & Notes “Advanced Screenwriting” is open to students who have taken ENG 204, 205, 207, 307, and/or have obtained permission from the instructor.
Instructor Churchill The digital revolution has opened up scholarship to broader audiences via new platforms. This course applies user-centered design to humanities scholarship in order to reach new audiences. Students will design their own humanities research projects, from initial conception to online publication and audience outreach. They will learn how to frame a topic, identify experts in the field, prepare an annotated bibliography, compile a literature review, and make an original contribution. Students will select digital tools appropriate to their projects, using WordPress as the primary platform for publishing their work and social media for networking with real audiences. The course will focus on UX-design: making humanities scholarship accessible, interactive, and immersive in order to enhance users’ experience. Students will develop digital dexterity and acquire skills in research, design, project management, collaboration, and social media networking that they can apply within and beyond academia. Satisfies a major requirement in English. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Digital Studies. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Parker “Forms of Fiction” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites. Satisfies the Innovation requirement for the English major. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory. Satisfies the Literary Thought, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement
Instructor Parker A study of the theories and practice of creativity, this course will be a genre-bending exploration of how we invent and who we are as a result. With numerous guest lecturers, as well as collaborative and discovery-based assignments, the course will focus on generative thinking and expressive meaning making. There are no prerequisites for creativity, and students from all disciplines are welcome. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Forms of Poetry Instructor Rippeon The word “poetry” comes from a Greek root, poiesis , which is related to a form of the verb “to make.” Let’s therefore remind ourselves, here and now, that a poem is a made thing , and that to talk about poetics is to talk about acts and/or habits of making . We may find it useful to begin with this reminder, because so much of the contemporary imagination regarding “writing” centers on imagination, individuality, and solitude. What happens when we break open these ideas, and focus on the act of writing as an act of making ? What happens when we give ourselves over to process , and let the poem and the process underhand lead the way? While there may be any number of ways to do so, this course is organized around three (hopefully) generative approaches to the writing of poems: Dictation, Document, and Ritual. What does it mean to receive rather than to write one’s poems? How does conceiving of the poem, the page, and even the word as an object already in the world change what it means to make a poem? And what about repeated and/or structured habits of presence or presentation-which we might call ritual ? We will explore a small set of writers who are exemplary in these regards, and we will read and discuss their works, engage with these modes of making, and share and discuss our works with each other. Our course will be divided into three units on the previous topics, and each unit will include one sustained workshop session. You will keep a notebook, write a series of exercises, and respond in a sustained manner to our primary readings, and you will share your work in a structured manner in smaller groups. You will also be workshopped by the full class once during the semester. At the end of the semester, you will have a portfolio of these pieces, along with other short-form prose responses. Our goal, over the course of the semester, is not to write a perfect workshop poem, but rather to develop and sustain a series of generative writing practices. “Forms of Poetry” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. “Forms of Poetry” explores three different types of writing (literary criticism, critical theory, and poetry) while assuming no significant expertise in any one area. Satisfies English major (Innovation Course) and minor requirements. Satisfies Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary minor requirement. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing/Rhetoric requirement. No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites. Satisfies English major (Innovation Course) and minor requirements. Satisfies Communication Studies major requirement. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing Rhetoric requirement. Other Topics- Not currently offered Forms of Poetry Instructor Parker “Forms of Poetry” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. “Forms of Poetry” explores three different types of writing (literary criticism, critical theory, and poetry) while assuming no significant expertise in any one area. Satisfies English major (Innovation Course) and minor requirements. Satisfies Global Litererary Thoery Interdisciplinary minor requirement. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing Rhetoric requirement. The Unreliable Narrator in News- Fall 2023 Instructor Drew In film, tv, and literature, the unreliable narrator is a character whose credibility is compromised, whether because of malice, ignorance, or misunderstanding. But what happens when the real world’s official documentarians-journalists-are widely deemed to be unreliable narrators? Today, half of all Americans think national news organizations deliberately mislead them ( Gallup & the Knight Foundation ). This course will consider the literary concept of the unreliable narrator, and what happens to news coverage, public policy, elections, public discourse, and the idea of truth itself when journalists are considered unreliable narrators. The class will explore recent and current news coverage and speak with journalists and sources involved with those stories. Topics will include the rise of conspiracy theories, the role of social media, and the emergence of AI in news. The class will also provide practical information on how to suss out unreliable narrators and narratives in news-as a news producer or consumer. Prerequisites & Notes No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.
Instructor Staff Introduction to theories of modern linguistics as they illuminate the historical development of English phonology, morphology, and syntax from Old and Middle English to Modern English. Attends to both written and spoken English; examines definitions and theories of grammar, as well as attitudes toward language change in England and the U.S. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Rippeon This is a production-oriented course that introduces students to various aspects of small-press and artist’s-book production, including flat and folded book structures, ‘zines and chapbooks, and artists’ books. Through theoretical and craft-oriented readings, and by exploring materials in Special Collections and the VAC, students will consider such questions as how material form intersects with literary content, how small-press and artists’-book production stands in relation to social and historical contexts, and how the material form of the book may respond to (and incorporate) emerging media. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Instructor Staff In the first chapter of Job, God asks Satan, “Whence comest thou?” And Satan responds, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” This course follows Satan’s travels through literary works such as Job, the Gospels, Dante’s Inferno , Milton’s Paradise Lost , Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Goethe’s Faust , short fiction by Hawthorne and Poe, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner , Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita , “Satan” from The Autobiography of Malcolm X ; films such as The Exorcist , accompanied by James Baldwin’s analysis in his book The Devil Finds Work , and The Witch ; TV shows such Fargo , American Gods, and Lucifer . Secondary readings and guest faculty will help contextualize these varied Satans and the cultures that produced them. Before there were humans or texts composed by humans, according to Abrahamic traditions, Satan was the first being to plot his own path, the first to want something new and different. In that sense, Satan is the driving energy of innovative courses. ENG 333 accordingly satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major. The course is innovative in scope and in its assignments. It requires not only students’ participation but also their leadership in class meetings; five brief projects in response to the course’s texts and topics; and a presentation on a representation of Satan omitted from the current syllabus. The course culminates in a collaborative digital mapping project, through which students will document some important appearances of Satan across millennia and across the globe where he has walked up and down. Satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Norris This course uses narrative medicine as a lens to understand the shifting definitions of illness and health and how they manifest in our personal and social lives. We’ll consider how meaning in medicine is made through storytelling, the different types of stories told, and how those stories engage with the larger world we live in. We will read a variety of creative nonfiction texts, as well as consider how these stories might be told off the page in other art forms. By the end of the semester, students should be able to identify, analyze, and produce a variety of narratives in medicine. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Public Health major and minor requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
ENG 340Masculinities in Early British Literature and Beyond
Instructor Staff Like other sections of ENG 340, this section offers an introduction to some of the most famous works and figures of early British literature. Unlike other sections of ENG 340, this course focuses on the texts of early British literature where masculinity was defined, redefined, and debated, often with anxious intensity. That intensity arose, in part, from the tension between believing that the behavior of men (or at least the behavior of real men) will be naturally, always “masculine”; while also believing that this seemingly natural, unchanging “masculinity” needs endless explaining and reinforcing. As a group, the texts of ENG 340 suggest that singular masculinity may not exist at all-thus the plural in the title of this course: “masculinities.” Throughout a vast sweep of literary history, this section of ENG 340 remains alert to the present-thus the final word in the title of this course: “beyond.” Informed by their study of early British literature and the cultures that produced it, students will analyze artifacts of current culture and its preoccupations with masculinity. They will ask how much texts of the past can clarify the present, either as forebears of dominant assumptions in 2025 or as forgotten alternatives that can open fresh insights into our art, our politics, our everyday conversations. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major and minor.
ENG 342Medieval Literature A: Medieval Women or B: Crusade, Violence, and Literature
ENG 342 0 Woman’s Work:Female Playwrights Instructor Green This course provides a close look at work created for the stage by women since 2000. The analysis of plays written and produced in the 21st century will be set in the context of feminist and queer theory which has offered insights into the cultural function of “women’s work.” Satisfies a requirement in the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Theatre major or minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Literary and Cultural Representations track of the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement. Medieval Literature Both A and B satisfy the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. ENG 342A Medieval Women Instructor Green An interdisciplinary study of medieval English literature, visual art, and spirituality from the 8th through the 15th century. Most texts in translation.
Instructor Vincent This course examines the relevance of William Shakespeare to the history of law and the practice of justice. What do Shakespeare’s poems and plays have to teach us about the law? Why do judges continue to cite Shakespeare in their opinions? And how might Shakespeare help us understand what justice is? We will read Shakespeare’s works alongside court opinions and other forms of legal writing to grapple with long-standing debates in the history of common law, statutory law, and constitutional law. Along the way, students will be introduced to a wide range of legal topics, including contracts, torts, evidence, civil procedure, criminal law, estate law, and conflict of laws. This course will be of particular interest to prelaw students. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Staff This course follows John Milton’s carefully shaped career, starting with early poems, such as Lycidas, before considering prose, such as Areopagitica, and the late masterpieces, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Milton’s texts ask some of the most important questions of the Western tradition: what is the relation between an artist and predecessors? how much should governments constrain individuals’ choices? are there “natural” elements of gender and sexuality? if God is both all-good and all-powerful (a huge “if”), why is there so much suffering? As befits these big questions, ENG 355 emphasizes class discussion and individual discovery through formal and informal writing. In the Miltonic tradition, this course also emphasizes choice: students may choose to take a comprehensive final examination or participate in an all-day reading of Paradise Lost, a rare opportunity for students to learn about themselves and about one of the most influential poems in literary history, all in one unforgettable day. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Staff Examines representations of sexuality, desires, and passion in British literature. This trans-historical course proceeds both from the observation that we may see sexuality as a set of scripted performances and from the theory that sexual desire has a history, even a literary one. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Vaz The Eighteenth Century was not just a time of powdered wigs and bone-crunching gowns. It was a time of deception, seduction, and decadence writ large. By studying a variety of texts like mock epics, trenchant satires, feisty novels, caustic engravings, flippant opera, and bawdy comedies, we will explore this culture of privilege and irreverence built in part on a growing consumer culture that was underwritten by an expanding empire as well as class and gender disparities. Raunchiness was both celebrated and satirized in a culture where people across the classes were as consumable as the newly fashionable chocolate sold in the classy hubs of decadence and debauchery - the infamous chocolate houses –and the result was as bitter, if you couldn’t afford the sugar. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
ENG 362A: British Romanticism or B: Reimagining Blake
Check schedule for course offerings. Both A and B satisfy the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement Both A and B fulfill the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major. 362A British Romanticism Instructor Vaz Topical study of the poetry and prose of the period ranging from the examination of Romantic gender ideology to studies of individual authors Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement 362B Reimagining Blake Instructor Vaz William Blake was a risk-taker and a rule-breaker. In his creative output, he sought to unshackle the ideological “mind-forg’d manacles” that stunted human thought. We will study Blake’s seminal works and apply some risk-taking and rule-breaking of our own by digitally recreating a few of his illustrated plates. Just as Blake used text and image in his original plates, so will we, as we creatively and critically reimagine Blake’s work and his message. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Fackler, Jensen History of the Novel: Can a novel do anything? What is the novel’s capacity for social change? Conversely, how have social issues shaped the history of the novel in America? This course examines the American novel as social commentary from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and interrogates the impact of long-form fiction on American politics and society. How has the American novel been employed as social commentary, and to what ends? We will seek to answer these questions by reading novels confronting racism, slavery, misogyny, and war. In this class, we will read texts by authors like Richard Wright, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. Additionally, we will consider the legacy of influential novels by examining similar contemporary texts and modern retellings. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Satifies Global Literary Theory major requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Fackler This course considers the development of literary forms across the genres of the novel, drama, and poetry after Modernism and the end of the British empire. We will examine works from 1945 to the present, as writers tackle late twentieth- and early twentieth-century pressures such as globalization, terrorism, and genetic engineering. The post-War period of British drama is comparable in depth to the Renaissance. Meanwhile, it is a moment of intense self-reflection and reflexivity, as novelists take a distinctly metafictional turn. Authors under consideration include Larkin, Hill, Osborne, Pinter, Amis, Spark, Ishiguro, Winterson, Churchill, Orton, Barnes, Carter, Orwell, Dabydeen, Leonard, Harrison, McEwan, and Smith.
ENG 370Davidson Summer Program in Cambridge England
Limited to thirty students, the Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge focuses on the history and literature of late 18th- and 19th-century Britain. Students may receive credit for either English 370 or History 390. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Instructor Vaz The Victorians were obsessed with a whole lot of things. Understandably, since they were living in a world of intense change when long-held beliefs were being questioned and sometimes crushed. In this course, we will explore how the Victorians challenged gender roles, authorized female desire as much as they vilified it, dealt with the empire on which the sun had not yet set, reeled from the mind-boggling theory of evolution, grappled with urbanization and the widening gap between the classes, and journeyed into altered states of consciousness. Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Churchill, Fackler Selected British and Commonwealth fiction from 1800 to 2000. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
ENG 373Modern Poetry from Walt Whitman to Bad Bunny.
Instructor Churchill A course concerned with schools, movements, innovations, and problems in modern poetry. Explore poetic geneaologies and investigate the relationship between modern poetry and modern bodies, selves, politics, and technologies. Satisfies the historical approaches requirement for the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Gender and Sexuality Studies major or minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Prerequisites & Notes No prerequisites, but a willingness to speak, even when you are afraid, is required.
Instructor Fox Why does the visual representation of disability matter? What does it do in the world? In this disability studies course, we will consider the ways in which picturing disability helps us do several things: expose and challenge stereotype; understand how disabled or ill bodies have been used to create cultural meanings; better understand the cultural, embodied, and lived experience of disability; underscore the way race, disability, sexuality, and gender are intersectional identities; reconsider disability in the medical context; and recognize the creativity and innovation emerging from human variation. Thus considering disability representation generates question upon question, many of which we will address: what are the ethics of picturing disability, and how can we circumvent hackneyed spectacle or voyeurism even as we take advantage of the “visual activism” picturing disability allows? How do we make typically invisible impairments like anxiety or depression visible? How do we show the reality of pain without reinforcing the sense that disability is only a tragic or isolating existence? How do we create visual representations that retort against tropes so familiar that we may not even realize we are using them to shape our personal definitions of disability? How can access become part of a disability aesthetic? What does it mean to make art and curate work from a disability justice perspective? In this course, we’ll look at a wide-ranging assortment of ways disability has been pictured in society. This will include film and television, painting and sculpture, zines and graphic novels; it will also include material objects like disability toys and adaptive devices and clothing. We will read authors who have considered the question of disability representation carefully, and you will create your own representation of disability. This course presumes no prior coursework in English or disability studies, and is open to students of all levels. I welcome those from all majors interested in studying the representation of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor S. Campbell The practice of writing works using the universes and characters of already established authors–Fanfiction–is a recent cultural phenomenon, beginning with Kirk/Spock slash of the 1970s and fueled by 21st century technologies that have enabled fans to appropriate, extend, and transform beloved characters and plots. The output is staggering: as of March 2017, Fanfiction.net alone holds 761,000 Harry Potter stories, and fanfiction writers have become best-selling authors (Cassandra Clare, E.L. James). Yet centuries of adaptation and appropriate permeate the Western canon, from Homer’s stock phrases to Shakespeare’s work with sources such as the Decameron and Holinshed’s Chronicles. ENG 375 will explore the world of fanfiction, from past iterations to the present extensive array of fanfiction. We will consider common tropes in fanfiction, such as fanon/canon, gender swapping, shipping, and transgressive pairings of many kinds, and investigate how social media enables empowered, creative fandom. The author may be “dead,” in Barthes’ estimation, yet he/she/zer are also very much alive and writing. Satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Fox Lushly enfleshed in America and want favorable representation? Fat chance. Indeed, not only is there social stigma, but pathologizing fat is central to the mission of pharmaceutical companies, the medical-industrial complex, and the diet and weight loss industry. Constructions of fat also intersect with gender, race, sexuality, age, class, and disability in ways that have been used to further regulate and oppress. Body positivity, while ostensibly a corrective, can itself fall prey to victim blaming, and reinforcing the idea that fat people are responsible for fixing their own oppression. What to do? Using the theoretical frameworks of disability studies and fat studies, this class will examine cultural, visual, and literary representations of fat bodies to ask: what beliefs does fatphobia inscribe, both about and beyond the fat body? How have writers, artists, and performers both created and challenged these ideas? Satisfies English major requirement. Satisfies a requirement for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor. Satisfies Public Health major and minor requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
ENG 377Change title to Forms of Young Adult Fiction
Instructor Campbell Wide-ranging across subgenres (realism, fantasy science fiction, romance), young adult fiction is offered by all major trade publishers and tops best-seller lists as well as lists of banned books. While the phrase young adult may imply ” juvenile” or “simple,” award-winning young adult novels are complex, varied, and culturally significant. This hybrid writing course adopts a collaborative laboratory approach to its specialized literary genre via theory and practice, emphasizing both study of and making of young adult fiction. Together we will read literary criticism, discuss educational scholarship on the impacts of literacy, consider publishing trends, analyze contemporary narratives, conduct market analysis, write and revise fiction, and meet people publishing in field and read their work. Neither a workshop nor a lecture course, this course will promote writing and reading as acts of play. Ultimately, the course aims to investigate young adult fiction; what makes it work? What are its key components? What moves are possible in this genre? What moves are controversial, but important, in this genre? What are stories yet to be told and can I do the telling?
Instructor Vincent This course investigates the origins of the prison in early America to better understand the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration in the United States. We will read the earliest writings of incarcerated people in England and colonial America alongside depictions of the prison in a variety of literary genres. Over the course of the semester, we will visit the Rare Books Room and develop skills working with early modern, transatlantic materials in archives. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Instructor Vaz British imperialism permeated the British literary tradition much as it did the globe. Using the lens of postcolonial theory we will examine the fictions and critiques of empire constructed in and through selected texts from the eighteenth century through the present in an attempt to unravel the cultural function of these powerful fictions. Our investigations will be informed by contemporary public discourse about slavery, imperialism, and nationalism, so that we can better grasp the literary and socio-political context of British colonialism and its after-effects. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Cultural Production and Expressions category). Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
ENG 385African American Literature of the Civil Rights Movement
Instructor Flanagan Following the bus boycotts and other struggles for civil rights in the early 20 th century, African American writers created a literature that is not only distinctive from that of their literary ancestors, but intellectually and spiritually different from any other American literature across timed. The early years of this literature can be described as the most neo-African-centered of African American literary output, concerned, as it is, with the cultural values that writers such as Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, and Leopold Senghor espoused. It is a literature that was a necessary corollary to the social. Economic, and political battles being waged in American’s streets, courts, congress, and in parts of the African diaspora. This course focuses, therefore, on the connections between the literary product and those particular social, political, and economic issues most of linked to the modern Civil rights and Black Power Movements, and beyond. In addition to novels, poems, and at least one play, the course will give serious consideration to the development of an African American Literary aesthetic through the study of critical essays. Satisfies English major and minor requirement. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Fox In the midst of our highly visual and multimedia age, we don’t typically go immediately to the stage as a site of significant cultural conversation. Part of this is the availability of digital media; part of this is the economic inaccessibility of theater to many people; part of this is the limited availability of resources for the performing arts. Still, there is simply no substitute for the vitality and importance of live theater. To paraphrase Edward Albee, theater puts a mirror before an audience and asks them: “This is who you are. Now what are you going to do about it?” This course will examine the origins and development of contemporary Anglophone theater in the global north, post-1960, with an emphasis on American and British drama. We will place particularly heavy emphasis on plays of the last two decades, examining the ways in which recent theater has asked its audiences to contemplate issues of concern to contemporary life including (although certainly not limited to) race and racism in America; gender and sexuality; health care inequities; global violence against women; migration and transnational capitalism; and the commodification of human relations. We will also discuss how theater challenges us to find creative solutions through connection, care, community, and claiming identity; it likewise centers those solutions emerging from within marginalized communities. No prior experience reading drama is necessary, and I welcome students of all levels and from across the disciplines. Possible course authors include: August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Jez Butterworth, Antoinette Nwandu, Young Jean Lee, Mike Lew, Martyna Majok, John Belluso, Tony Kushner, Amy Herzog, Edward Albee, and Ayad Akhtar. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff How is speculative fiction different from science fiction, and what can it teach us about our world today and possible worlds to come? How does environmental speculative fiction engage climate change, ecoapocalypse, pandemics, genocide, the petrostate - and how humans grapple with them? This course addresses these and other questions by focusing on novels by Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Margaret Atwood, and Omar el Akkad. This discussion-based, upper-level English course also delves into literary theory about speculative fiction, Afrofuturisms, and Indigenous futurisms. Satisfies English major requirement. Satisfies Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Vincent This course investigates fundamental questions about what literature is and why it matters. What counts as literature? How does literature produce meaning? What is the relationship between literature and society? Can we read our lives like we read a text? In recent decades, literary critics and theorists have revolutionized our understanding of both literature and the world. This course will survey contemporary developments in literary criticism and theory while situating them within a long history stretching back to the ancients. Key topics will include ecocriticism, critical race studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, media theory, and the history of the book. Satisfies Chinese Language and Literature major requirement. Satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives requirement. Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Jensen What is American women’s literature, and how has it been shaped by writers of diverse identities? Susie King Taylor asked in Reminiscences of My Life in Camp why her service in the Civil War did not grant her equality. Nella Larsen noted in Passing how something as fragile as race could dictate a woman’s life and opportunities. Octavia Butler speculated in Dawn that prejudices would continue to define American society, even in post-apocalyptic worlds. This course will examine literature by American women from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, considering the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and labor. We will consider how American women depict issues of identity and belonging by examining four thematic groups: slavery and freedom, liminality, social reproduction, and the speculative. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.
Instructor Staff Independent study under the direction of a faculty member who approves the topic and determines the means of evaluation. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Permission of the instructor required.
Instructor Staff Independent study under the direction of a faculty member who approves the topic and determines the means of evaluation. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Permission of the instructor required.
Instructor Staff Independent study under the direction of a faculty member who approves the topic and determines the means of evaluation. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Permission of the instructor required.
Instructor Staff Seminars, numbered 400 through 494, are limited to twelve juniors and seniors with preference to English majors. Topics vary by section and year and are posted on the English Department website. Prerequisites & Notes Some topics provide credit in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor (as noted in individual seminar descriptions).
Instructor Specific topic varies Previous offerings Title: True Crime Perry In this creative writing seminar, we will learn a variety of craft techniques via close study of several works of true crime. The life and death stakes of true crime, combined with its presence across multiple discourses-judicial, spiritual, medical, political, literary-make it a particularly good genre through which to think about how we mediate our relationship to truth and reality in a text. Discussion will also address the ethics of representing others’ stories and how to infuse intimate stories with the preoccupations of one’s historical moment. We’ll also focus on nuts-and-bolts writing skills: creating a self on the page; building characters; constructing scenes; crafting images and metaphors; and incorporating research. There will be many opportunities to write creatively via short experiments and longer essays or memoir pieces. One need not write about violence to benefit from the course: our definition of terms as such as crime, justice, betrayal, safety, and danger will be capacious. Title: Trauma Writing Norris
Instructor Flanagan This course offers students in any major at Davidson College an opportunity to realize their dream of writing the first strong draft of a novella that has the potential to be developed into a novel. Before the writing begins, students will read and dissect two novellas, each selected from a list of prize-winning books. These selections are intended to inspire the student-writer’s creativity. By the fourth week, writing begins in earnest with short exercises produced in and out of class. By the end of the term, each writer would have produced at least 60 pages of a compelling story. Writers should be prepared to write often, discuss their work in the seminar, and be open to critiques that are intended to help them create “sexy” fiction. *”Sexy” means provocative, intriguing, inspiring, and/or compelling. It does not refer to pornographic but it can encompass the erotic.
Instructor Churchill The digital revolution has opened humanities scholarship to new modes of producing and disseminating knowledge, resulting in the emergence of a new field: Digital Humanities. This team-taught seminar will emphasize four pillars of Digital Humanities: 1) design, 2) collaboration, 3) inclusivity, and 4) networks. We will form teams of 2-4 people to design research projects from initial conception to online publication via a WordPress website hosted in Davidson Domains, working together to redress critical biases and exclusions in scholarship. We will learn project design strategies, apply principles of UX-design, and integrate digital storytelling apps into our websites. We will use social media to network, connect with scholars in the field, and cultivate an audience for our projects. In the process, we will develop digital dexterity and skills in research, writing, design, teamwork, networking, and project management-skills are not only fundamental to digital humanities, but also sought after by employers outside academia. Satisfies a major requirement in English. Satisfies the Innovation requirement in English. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Digital Studies.
ENG 409Television: Queer Representations (=GSS 401)
Instructor Fackler With its roots in the gendered domestic suburban household, television has a longstanding investment in questions of gender and sexuality. Pushing back against the assumption that LGBTQ characters did not appear on our screens in a sustained way until the 1980s, this course will investigate how TV representation of queer life have changed with the evolution of the medium since the 1950s. Recent work in the field of queer TV studies has unearthed queer characters from previously invisible archives, charted changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity in broadcast programming, and documented the organizational strategies employed by television narrative that disclose and contain expressions of non-normative sexualities. Indeed, in one of the foundational texts on queer TV, Lynne Joyrich argues that “U.S. television does not simply reflect an already closeted sexuality but actually helps organize sexuality as closeted.” Extending Joyrich’s line of reasoning, we will seek to understand the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that structure representations of televised queerness. How might we understand the contemporary series Transparent alongside or against the representation of a trans character on All in the Family (1975)? Why might The New Normal, a seemingly positive portrayal of new kinship structures, have failed as a series in 2013? Even as we watch the problematic take on villainous lesbian characters in the Angie Dickinson vehicle, Police Woman (“Flowers of Evil,” 1974), we will move beyond diagnoses and critiques of “bad” versus “good” queer representations to acknowledge the pleasures that may attend the viewing of even ideologically corrupt programming. Which shows and episodes became lightening rods for desire despite their failure to produce fully realized queer characters? And what genealogy (or genealogies) of queer TV might take us from the groundbreaking episodes of Ellen (“The Puppy Episode”) and Roseanne (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) in the 1990s to the moment at which a Vanity Fair cover declared that with “Gay-per-view TV” shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, prime time had “come out” (2003)? As we historicize such developments, we will consider the contributions of writer-producers and series creators such as Alan Ball and Ryan Murphy, and analyze a variety of programs from “quality television” to animation, from the sit-com to reality TV, and from sci-fi to the game show. Satisfies a major requirement in English. Satisfies a minor requirement in English. Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major. Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies. Satisfies the Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Flanagan Just as painters often use their art to tell stories, paintings have served as inspiration for fiction writers such as Toni Morrison. In this course, participants will study paintings by several painters whose works appear on what is called an open-air gallery on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia. Dr. Flanagan will provide the images, and the class will take a virtual tour with one of her colleagues who lives in Djerba. Participants in this course will compose fictional works-graphics are welcome-based on one or two of the paintings, and will, in the process, engage in discussions of the poetics embedded in the paintings. The best renditions will be submitted as a collection to Bloomsbury Press for publication. Satisfies the Innovation requirement in English. Satisfies the Diversity Requirement for the English major. Satisfies Global Literary Theory major requirement.
Instructor Fackler From Samuel Richardson’s titular heroine Pamela obsessing about her wardrobe (1740), to the conspicuous consumption of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and from the discussion of Hero’s sartorial choices in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) to the iconic Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), there is a clear literary history of fashion. This course will consider both fictional and theoretical engagements with fashion alongside the works of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, whose prose reveals the fingerprint specificity of their writing styles. Working from Roland Barthes’s theory in The Fashion System to Cecil Beaton’s diaries and Joseph Roach’s study of the “It” factor (“the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people”), this transcultural and transhistorical course will investigate style as both form and content. Whether we are looking at the fashion and literary styles of the roaring twenties in Fitzgerald’s works or the punk subcultures of the UK in the 1980s, we will question how literary innovation and fashion interpenetrate.
Instructor Jung This discussion-driven, research-intensive seminar approaches science fiction and fantasy as world literature: not simply genres that “travel,” but forms continually remade through translation, colonial and postcolonial histories, diaspora, indigenous sovereignty, and uneven technological modernities. As a critical-creative workshop in global speculative writing, the course pairs close reading with sustained craft practice. We will read SF/F from multiple regions and traditions, often in translation, not only to interpret what these texts argue and imagine, but to study how they are built: voice, narrative architecture, worldbuilding, mythmaking, genre-bending, and the ethical pressures that arise when writing across cultures, histories, and languages. Each primary text functions as a mentor text. In seminar discussion we will identify its craft moves (how it handles time, wonder, bureaucracy, monsters, intimacy, technology, spirits, empire, climate, and diaspora) then students will test those strategies through original creative work: short stories, scenes, flash fictions, speculative poetry, paratext experiments (“translated from…”), and world dossiers. The course treats “world SF/F” as a set of practices and pathways (circulation, translation, and local literary lineages) and asks what it means to write speculative work that is ambitious, responsible, and formally inventive in a global field. Students will complete a revised final portfolio accompanied by a critical artist’s statement situating their work within the course’s literary and theoretical conversations.
Letters, Diaries, and Notebooks as Literary Forms Instructor: Staff This seminar looks at the ways that writers, often from marginalized communities, used “non-literary” forms such as letters, diaries or notebooks as a form of expression when traditional avenues of publication or literary recognition were not available to them. In addition to looking at texts from various literary traditions we will also examine the ways that contemporary writers have returned to these forms, including a consideration of blogs and social media as part of the contemporary expression of these forms. Instructor: S. Campbell Looking into the past to make sense of the present pervades non-fiction writing. This type of reflection emerges in a variety of forms and lengths, including the brief personal memoir, the podcast, and the multi-volume autobiography. Whereas autobiography explores large pieces of a life in an effort to explain a whole person, the memoir uses a narrow focus, what William Zinsser terms a “window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition” (136). We will read memoirs that provide windows into the childhoods and adulthoods of people of varied classes, ethnicities, and experiences. Students will approach the genre both critically and creatively, exploring what it means and can mean to write the self.
ENG 422Creating Narratives: Investigating Davidson’s Literary Past
Instructor S. Campbell Although scholars debate aspects of creative writing’s origins in the American academy, faculty at institutions such as Harvard were known to accept fiction or poetry for class credit by the late nineteenth century (Myers 283). If the following excerpt from the 1895 Quips and Cranks is not merely satirical, the same was true at Davidson. He looked so strange I asked him if he was sick. He said no, a thought had struck him. I asked him what kind of thought. He said an unthought-like thought that was the soul of thought. I felt dazed at this answer, but said nothing, as the subject was getting beyond me. [N. B. He was writing a poem for Quips and Cranks–Editor of Q and C.] So I turned the subject deftly by asking him what he had in his notebook. He said mostly bout rimes that he had written in his Soph. year for the English professor, and a few little things of his own that he called Heart-Foam. It is clear that Davidson students read and wrote creatively, whether “rimes” for class or personal “Heart-Foam,” long before the inclusion of formal creative writing instruction in our curriculum. In this seminar, we will explore early literary activities and attitudes at Davidson. As exemplified by the work of Davidson’s Commission on Race and Slavery, revisiting our institutional past “with fresh, critical eyes” can provide what John Thelin terms “a source of renewal and rediscovery” (History of American Higher Education xi). The Davidson archives hold rich material in both print and digital forms, including multiple student literary publications, from 1886, when the Eumenean and Philanthropic Literary Societies launched the Davidson Monthly. For example, the same issue of Quips and Cranks yields not only the passage provided above but also a satiric description of an English class as well as multiple student poems. Seminar participants will collaborate in uncovering evidence of student literary activity on campus, analyzing that evidence, and situating these activities amid broader literary trends and collegiate practices. We will inevitably encounter writing that reveals contemporaneous biases and limitations even as we witness the abiding drive to creative work among our student body. Class projects will be published in Omeka, a content management system that allows rich displays of archival material. Satisfies English major requirement.
Instructor Vincent This course investigates the origins of the prison in early America to better understand the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration in the United States. We will read the earliest writings of incarcerated people in England and colonial America alongside depictions of the prison in a variety of literary genres. We will also visit the Rare Books Room and develop skills working with early modern, transatlantic materials in archives. Along the way, we will survey theories of the prison from Plato to Angela Davis.
Instructor Staff What happens when a literary genius takes hold of a mere suggestion and transforms it into literary gold? By what process of imagination does a snippet of news in The New York Times become Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or spawn Susan Orleans’s orchid thief, John Laroche, who reemerges as played by Chris Cooper in Spike Jonze’s conversion of The Orchid Thief into a film about the very matter of Adaptation ? How does Miss Kay grow from what Muriel Spark calls “the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie” into that fully formed character in her prime? What happens when Shakespeare takes hold of a lackluster little narrative by Giraldi Cinthio, turns it on its ear, and produces Othello out of base metal? Or when George Saunders spins Lincoln in the Bardo out of a line of history that concerns Abraham Lincoln’s visit to his son’s tomb? This seminar will explore the literary imagination by focusing on such transformations into nonfiction, fiction, drama, and film-some from humble origins, others from already established masterpieces .
Instructor Staff This seminar offers intensive study of John Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost . Discussions will involve close analysis of individual lines-and indeed, individual words-and will examine the contexts of the text, from ancient traditions to the present. Assignments will require researching the critical history of the most influential epic poem in English and considering the poem’s distinctive claims about humans, angels, devils, God, and nature in “the story of all things.” This seminar is designed for juniors and seniors who hope to refine their advanced literary criticism; who hope to share their criticism in both orthodox and unorthodox forms, such as staging public performances of Milton’s poem; and who hope to reflect on big questions before graduation, that looming ritual of expulsion from Paradise. Prerequisites & Notes First-year and second year students require permission of the instructor.
ENG 462Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic
Check schedule to determine which section is being offered. The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic lnstructor Vaz There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read. That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception. Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama. In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worthy of scholarship in the last 30 years of the twentieth century. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Gossip Instructor Fackler Gossip, long an object of serious investigation in the social and life sciences, has only begun in the past few years to receive similarly serious attention in the humanities. Given the recent publication of major critical works that focus on the interpenetrations of gossip, literature, and culture, ours is an auspicious and important moment at which to revisit, expand upon, and complicate Patricia Meyer Spacks’s claim that gossip constitutes a species of “drama” in which interlocutors “[speak] the language of shared experience, [reveal] themselves as they talk of others, [and construct] a joint narrative-a narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.” A recent article in The New York Times declared, “Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal.” This seminar proceeds from the alternative position that gossip must be historicized for its changing purposes, routes of circulation, and impact to be understood properly. The course will be transatlantic and transhistorical in its focus, and will draw on cultural studies and performance studies for its methodology and mode(s) of critical inquiry. In turning to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultures, we will investigate the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, and film. Throughout the course we will foreground the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality. Satisfies the Innovation requirement for the English major. Romantic Radicalism Instructor Vaz For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.” In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period. By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Instructor S. Campbell Spring 2025 When life [sinks] down for a moment, the range of experience [seems] limitless … . Beneath it is dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep, but now and again we rise to the surface, and this is what you see us by. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse , 1927. As a literary critic, social commentator, and, above all, experimental author, Virgina Woolf is a key figure in British modernism. In this seminar, we will encounter deep and limitless mysteries within Woolf’s essays, short fiction, and novels, including Mrs. Dalloway , To the Lighthouse , The Waves , A Room of One’s Own , and Three Guineas . We will explore the relationship between her work and literary modernism, between her criticism and her art, and between her art, and her biography. Critics have developed widely divergent readings of Woolf as an effete elite, an engaged citizen, a feminist warrior, a neurotic and troubled artist, and/or as a queer icon. We will grow together in our understanding of this complex, crucial 20 th century writer through substantial collaborative discussion and individual exploration culminating in seminar-length research projects. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Prerequisites & Notes Juniors and Seniors only.
Instructor Staff In this seminar designed for advanced English majors, we will take a deep dive into Herman Melville’s classic, deeply flawed, troubling, jubilant, vexed, and vexing novel Moby-Dick . Published in 1851 - the same year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized, Sojourner Truth first delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, Western Union was founded, and the US Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act - Moby-Dick was very much a novel of its time and place. Early in the semester, we will read some of the texts that inspired Melville; at the end of the semester, we will stage a live 24-hour reading of the novel. In between, we’ll take our time to read, investigate, interrogate, and interpret a work that has baffled and beguiled readers for 170 years.
Seminar: Special Topics Instructor Churchill Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939 In the early twentieth century, Paris became a magnet for American women seeking to break free from the constraints of home. The City of Lights offered them liberty to redefine themselves, experiment with form and identity, and participate in the international movement known as modernism. This seminar examines the work of three groundbreaking writers-Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Gwendolyn Bennett-who, whether in Paris or beyond, challenged artistic norms and expanded the boundaries of language, race, gender, and aesthetics. Through close readings of their poetry, prose, and visual art, we will explore how these writers responded to modernity, from Stein’s radical syntax, to Loy’s avant-garde provocations, and Bennett’s fusion of Harlem Renaissance innovation with European influences. How did expatriation enable new forms of creative and personal expression? How did their work negotiate tensions between belonging and otherness, experimentation and tradition? How did they form networks of community and find publication outlets for their work? Combining literary analysis and archival research with historicist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory perspectives, this seminar invites students to consider the cultural forces that shaped modernism and the women who defied expectations to define it. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies Global Literary Theory Major and Minor Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies Major and Minor
Instructor Staff The principal claim of English 487 is that a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read. Indeed, modern trials are in effect storytelling contests, with two competing “narrators” telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience. Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions. Nevertheless, a great deal of contemporary literary theory offers genuine insight into the kinds of fictions that get constructed in a courtroom. This seminar tests a number of hypotheses about legal fictions, offers direct observation of some real trials in progress, and asks students to undertake research in the interdisciplinary areas where legal studies and literary studies overlap.
Instructor Parker An advanced seminar in the theory and practice of reading fiction in the context of current history and cultural shifts, Contemporary American Fiction will explore what a story says in relation to how it works. The seminar’s primary texts will include novels and short story collections, along with essays from Theory of the Novel and various other critical and ancillary texts. Possible authors include Anthony Doerr, Don Delillo, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Percival Everett, Tess Gunty, Laird Hunt, Daphne Kalotay, John Keene, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Hilary Leichter, Carmen Maria Machado, Jason Mott, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Rone Shavers, Amber Sparks, Elizabeth Strout, Luis Alberto Urrea, Colson Whitead, and Charles Yu. For this course, a seminar paper or an extended work of original fiction will be required as a final project. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major.
Instructor Flanagan Literary Mysteries is an exciting Innovation course that offers opportunities for students to explore the lovely literary language that writers such as P.D. James, Umberto Eco, Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell employ in novels such as An Unsuitable Job for a Woman , The Island of the Day Before , Missing Joseph , and Dark Corners , respectively. Forget the blood, gore, shoot-em-up of many ordinary crime stories. Literary Mysteries are intellectually and dramatically intriguing, layered, intricate, and deftly plotted. Students will build evidence boards in digital sites as they follow the clues embedded in these plots to try to solve the mysteries before the end of the text, and in doing so, they will enhance their deductive skills. Satisfies the Innovation course requirement in English. Satisfies a literature elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Staff Film Art is a hands-on study of style and narration in the fiction film. That does not mean that you cannot make a documentary film for your final project. Study and production are two very different processes. We’ll proceed in this way: After a reminder of the pre- and post- production processes, we’ll focus on individual directorial styles. We’ll also make a communal film to learn that (most of the time) film is a collaborative art and to explore the capabilities and shortcomings of the available equipment (and talent). Then, each student will be given a chance to write/adapt, direct, film, and edit a short film using digital video cameras and non-linear editing equipment. The individual film need not be a fiction film. It should, however, be your best work. In the past, these were the films students submitted as their portfolio films for graduate school. We’ll look at those films in light of the latest theories of narrative and the knowledge about cinema acquired from the film-maker’s end. The final versions of all films will be burnt to DVDs and posted to VIMEO. If there are musicians among us, they will be given a chance to score a film and/or do sound design. Satisfies a requirement in the English major and minor. Satisifes a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor. Prerequisites & Notes Limited to juniors and seniors.
ENG 494Seminar: A - Disability in Literature and Art; B - Multicultural Literature
Check schedule to determine which section is being offered. 494A Disability in Literature and Art Instructor Fox The artistic tradition is rife with representation of disability. These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil. Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death. Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of disability culture, the widely diverse members of which are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new artistic tradition. Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject - an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries.
Instructors S. Campbell, Churchill The senior capstone for English majors is a departure from our typical senior seminars, which typically focus on a specific author(s), critical field, theoretical approach, or creative genre, and aspire to yield near graduate-level work. Yet many of our majors have no immediate plans for graduate study and are more concerned with finding a job and figuring out how to live as adults in “the real world.” This capstone seminar is designed to help students build bridges between their academic study at Davidson and the lives they’d like to live after they graduate. Through student-directed reading, digital research and writing, collaborative inquiries, and consultations with alums, this seminar will help students set goals and develop a personal narrative and toolkit of practices to help achieve them. Culminating in a research project that uses digital tools and platforms to demonstrate the knowledge and skills students have gained during their college careers, the course will include substantial reflection on developing a sustainable life and finding a career path or direction for the near future. Prerequisites & Notes Not open to first-year students and sophomores without instructor’s permission.
Instructor Parker Reading and research for the honors thesis taught by the student’s thesis director and the departmental program coordinator. Ordinarily, taken in the fall of the senior year. Prerequisites & Notes Permission of the instructor required.
Instructor Campbell This is the exciting, nerve-wracking, accomplishment-filled, culminating semester for Honors students! Students accepted into the Honors program in English for 2025-26 will develop original intellectual and creative projects that are the culmination of their degree work at Davidson. ENG 499 is the second half of the required two-course sequence meant to support Honors students as they carry out the necessary research, reading, and writing.
